


Winterlight

by sister_coyote



Category: Final Fantasy VI
Genre: Backstory, Elemental Magic, F/M, Post-Canon, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-13
Updated: 2009-08-13
Packaged: 2017-10-06 23:00:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sister_coyote/pseuds/sister_coyote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn't know how to cope with her silence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winterlight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [safety_caesars](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=safety_caesars).



> Spoilers for the entire game. Implied past... ickiness; nothing specified.

Celes keeps a house of her own in Narshe, though she seldom lives there, to Locke's confusion. "In Narshe" is an overstatement—it's a good two miles as the crows files from town, two miles largely uphill. To get to it they must take a ship from one continent to the next, travel through Narshe and up a road that is a great deal more than two miles long as it switchbacks up the hill. The road turns into a path, the path into a trail that passes through low brush and over freezing streams, before they reach the house, tucked securely in the lee of a cliff. The house once belonged to a trapper, who died in the cataclysm, and it lay empty until Celes came to buy it at a pittance from the town.

("You could have just taken it," Locke said, the first time he came with her. He wasn't ashamed to be more out of breath than Celes as she leapt easily from rock to rock. "No one else had any claim to it."

"I don't like to be indebted to anyone," she said. "And I don't want the village to resent me."

Locke would have dealt with such resentment by visiting the inn a few times, being as generous and charming as he could, earning their goodwill through conversation and not cold coin. But Locke is not Celes, and he knows that.)

She lives, most of the time, in Kohlingen with him, but she keeps the house, far away, up a mountain. She never really explains why. She visits it at midsummer and midwinter, but rarely for more than a tenday at a time. Locke goes with her sometimes; she never asks him to join her, but she never objects when he does.

But he only accompanies her in the summer.

Once he went with her in winter, and watched with disbelief as she cracked the ice on a pool not far from the house, stripped away her furs, and slipped into the water. She submerged and stayed beneath the surface until he was on his feet and steeling himself to dive in and drag her out—and then emerged when he was sure she must have caught her death in cold. Her lips were blue, and her fingertips beneath the nail were blue, too.

"You shouldn't—" he began, and then stopped when she turned on him a look as cold and even as the surface of the pool.

He doesn't ever tell Celes what to do, or what not to do. It is one of the unspoken arrangements between them.

She doesn't tell him what to do, either, even though sometimes he wishes she would.

He does not tell her what to do, and so he does not return with her in Narshe at midwinter, because he doesn't want to watch her turn blue and white and unearthly, and wonder if this time she will not make it back out of the water.

* * *

"How goes the hunting?" the man in the Kohlingen pub asks Celes. He is trying to be kind, she knows, for Locke's sake if nothing else, but the pure awkwardness of it makes her flinch from the question.

"Well enough," she says, instead. "I found a nest of bogeys and destroyed them, not far from the sheep pens."

"That's good to hear," the man says, and smiles. But the smile is forced; she can tell that she puts him ill at ease, as she puts most of the people of Kohlingen ill at ease. They tolerate her for Locke's sake, because they are glad to have him home and safe and happy—reasonably happy, anyway. But they look at her askance. They are afraid of her. They do not trust her.

(And no surprise at that. Locke is the black sheep of the town's founding family, a fact she had not known before; he ran away to be a thief and adventurer, and though they despaired of him sometimes they always loved him, youngest son and rake and daredevil with a heart of gold. And now they love him all the more, the prodigal returned and not only returned but a hero. But they don't know what to make of her, strange woman, former general, once a witch-knight, who does not know how to live among people who are not soldiers. She knows they miss Rachel, who before her death was bold and bright and laughing, and who could have been no less like Celes: small and curvy and dark-haired, with a ready wit and an easy way with people. Locke's match. She knows they look at her sometimes and see a mismatch instead, and wonder.)

"Celes," he says, returning from where he had been talking with the miller, laughing and sharing a pint of beer. He smiles to see her, and she smiles back. "How are you?"

"Well enough," she says, and lays her head on his shoulder to feel him put his arm around her back and draw her nearer.

She wonders sometimes if he looks at her and sees a mismatch, as well.

* * *

In the evening, in the house they share on the outer edge of Kohlingen (in town in deference to his preferences, on the outskirts in deference to hers), Celes strips out of her clothing in the firelight. She appears to have no awareness of how physically stunning she is. In the firelight, her white skin, her gold hair, her blue eyes are the starkest kind of beauty he's ever seen—or, no, they're like the beauty of a mountain range or a particularly elegant piece of jewelry. Certainly they're like no human beauty he's ever seen.

(Rachel was nothing like Celes, and in some ways that's almost a comfort—in bed he cannot easily compare them, for Celes is tall and lean and bright-fair where Rachel was small, curvy, her skin tan, her hair curly and dark. He cannot easily compare them in bed but out of bed he contrasts them with frightening ease. He knows he should not and yet still he does.)

"Rans seemed interested in your hunting," he says, encouragingly, sitting on the bed and watching her shed her shirt and pants. She does it with a practicality that does nothing to undercut the way she looks, lean muscles and subdued curves and the long shining curtain of her hair.

"Rans is interested in selling me another set of weapons," she says. She's smiling a little; a good sign. It's true that Rans is the blacksmith for the town, but —

"He's pleased that you're protecting us," Locke said. "Everyone is."

The smile fades from her face, and once again Locke doesn't know what he said wrong. Talking with Rachel was comfortable in a way that hasn't prepared him for this; talking to Celes is like running full-tilt across a field. Exhilarating while it lasts, but prone to stop suddenly and painfully if you put your foot down a rabbit-hole. "They're pleased there are few monsters about," she says.

"And they know that's your doing."

"Being glad of the result and being glad of the actor aren't the same thing at all," Celes says.

"Celes," he begins, but she is across the room and astride his lap before he can finish the sentence. Her fingertip touches his mouth, and he quiets, sucks the tip into his mouth to taste her skin.

"Hush," she says, and then begins to unlace his breeches. Locke hasn't been with enough women to know what 'usual' is—there was only Rachel from the first time he ever had sex (with her, in a hayloft, when they were both sixteen and stupid and crazy in love) until she—was hurt, and then after that women only sporadically and seldom, because he couldn't get close to them without guilt and fear, because he could only lie with women who didn't expect anything of him. A few lovers, no more, between Rachel and Celes—one a Returner who wanted a bit of diversion, one a fence who took a shine to him, one a prostitute who deflected his attempts to 'rescue' her. No more. So who is he to say what normal is?

But none of the other women have been as disinclined to conversation as Celes, and yet as eager in bed. There is no doubt that she had lovers before him, and—to his considerable relief—lovers who taught her to enjoy sex, who didn't teach her any reason to fear it. But, apparently, no one to teach her to enjoy ordinary conversation, conversation that has nothing to do with tactics or killing.

* * *

One of her favorite things about Locke: he is very flexible, in more ways than one. He has few preconceived notions of how things should go. So when she coaxes him on top of her, he takes the lead without question—and when she straddles him and takes him inside her body that way, he does not try to turn her over, unless she gives indication that what she wants is a struggle. And then he obliges—with laughter, something she has not often known as part of sex.

She loves his laughter, at the height of pleasure, though she cannot find the words to tell him so. His eyes are silver-hazel-grey, impossible to pin down, as he is impossible to pin down even when she has his hips held beneath the flexing muscles of her thighs, his shoulders beneath her hands and his mouth beneath hers. He compares her to sun and ice, but he is mist and quicksilver, and though she holds him she cannot truly get a grasp on him.

Not, at least, until after her orgasm, when he comes with muscles quaking and his mouth open on a sound as vulnerable as a death-cry and yet far sweeter.

She wants to hold onto that moment, when at the height of pleasure she understands him. But it passes, and he shifts beside her and looks at her, and once again she cannot read what he is thinking in the voluble silver of his eyes.

Still, wet with sweat and with her bones turned to water with the simple satisfaction of coupling, she is content not to understand him, for a time.

* * *

"I'm sorry," he says, for what feels like the hundredth time.

It isn't that she's rejected his apology. But she doesn't _talk_, and so she hasn't accepted it, properly, either. And he doesn't know how to cope with her silence.

"I am sorry," he says, "that I didn't have more faith in you. In Vector."

"You didn't have much reason to," she says, her voice distant and cold as the iron of Vector's walls.

"I did," he says. "I did. I—I knew you well enough then that I should have—"

"I could have been deceiving you."

The hell of it is that he can't tell whether she's absolving him, or convincing herself that his lack of faith is forgivable. "No, I should have—"

"It doesn't matter now."

"Yes, it does. It does. I should have—"

"You shouldn't worry so much about the past," she says, and her eyes are blue as the sky—as the sky's reflection on the ocean, deep and with secrets he cannot penetrate.

"It wasn't fair to you."

"The world is not fair."

He sits still a long time, looking at his hands. After a while she gets up and retrieves one of the rabbits she caught on her hunt, cleaned, and brought home. She spits it and lays it over the fire.

"It wasn't fair to you," he says, as the rabbit sizzles on its spit, "when you put yourself in the Empire's hands for m— for us."

She looks into the fire and says nothing.

"Did they hurt you?" he asks, because he can't not.

She says nothing, and turns the spit.

"Did they—" he says again, and then stutters off, looking at her profile, lit by flames.

"I don't want to talk about it," she says, softly. "It's over now."

* * *

_As soon as the warp spell took hold, she put one hand on her sword and folded her thumb across the rune-marks on the palm of her other hand—having cast her magic once, by surprise, it was too much to hope she could cast again before Kefka could, but perhaps there was aught else she _could_ do. And so as soon as the warp faded off she put up her hand and felt, sure enough, the sizzle of her runes absorbing the magic cast at her._

_The Stop hit her, full-force and full-body, seizing every muscle to marble stillness but leaving her eyes and mind working. (The better for her to see her own doom approaching.) And in an instant she realized what had happened: Kefka knew the extent of her powers as well as anyone save Cid and perhaps Leo, and had arranged it so that one of his guard would throw Magitek-power as a decoy for her runic magic, so that he could strike in the aftermath._

_He had always been one for such types of magic—nothing as simple as pure ice or clean fire for Kefka. She cursed herself, and cursed him, but only in her mind, for her lips and tongue were as frozen as the rest of her._

_"My dear," he said, "I was so sorry to hear that you had turned traitor. We were always . . . good friends, weren't we?" He trailed a fingertip down the curve of her cheek, down her throat, to linger just at her collarbone without going any lower. She was briefly glad of the Stop magic, that made it easy to keep her expression neutral._

_"Or perhaps not," he continued. "I never had as much chance to get to know you as I might have liked, what with Cid always around. And Leo. Cid never showed as much interest in me as in you, you know; I think he believed I was a failed experiment. And of course Leo—but I'm sure you want to see him yourself, don't you?"_

_No movement. No sound. She couldn't even flicker an eyelash, and indeed, her eyes were beginning to itch._

_"They did hover rather, didn't they? So I'm afraid Terra became my favorite."_

_And though she couldn't move, Celes could feel the burning rise of acid in the back of her throat. Terra. Perhaps this was her punishment for not having protected Terra, as Cid and then Leo had protected her. She couldn't have done much when they were both children, of course, but later . . . she had seen Terra, blank-eyed beneath the slave crown, always a ghost in Kefka's shadow, and she had not done anything. She had not done anything at all until Doma._

_Perhaps this was, finally, her penance._

_"Bind her hands," Kefka said to the soldiers. "Behind her back, crossed at the wrists. In fact, make sure you bind each wrist to the opposite forearm. I've seen her on the training ground; anything less and she will be dangerous." She could feel the tingle of Stop beginning to wear off. "But leave her legs free. It would be unfitting of a general of the Empire to be carried into her audience with the Emperor. Wouldn't it, my heart?"_

_She was free enough of the spell to feel the crawl of dread up her spine._

_"I can call you that, now, can't I?"_

_"Kefka," she said— slurred, as her mouth regained its mobility slowly._

_"I can call you that now, because we're going to be the _best_ of friends."_

* * *

Celes has nightmares sometimes. She won't talk about them, so all Locke can do is stroke her hair and the long line of her spine as she shivers, awake but unspeaking, in the dark. All Locke can do is coax her onto her belly so that he can rub the tensed muscles of her back.

"All you all right?" he asks her, when her shaking quells.

"I'm fine," she says, which means nothing. It's what she always says.

"Tell me," he says, "if there's anything I can do."

She turns onto her side, curls up into a conch-shell twist of limbs. Her eyes are closed, her hair like a spill of gold. She doesn't say anything.

"If there's anything I can do," he repeats, helpless, and thinks of Rachel falling, falling forever.

* * *

The dreams cling to her like cobwebs, even in the light of morning. She gives up trying to return to sleep and rises as quietly as she can, so that she doesn't wake Locke. (So that she doesn't wake Locke _again_. Somehow when she comes gasping awake from her dreams at night, he is always already awake and looking at her. Looking at her—looking after her. She loves his touch after a nightmare and hates stealing his sleep from him, and so she does not tell him that she appreciates it lest he feel obligated to wake with her every time. And yet although she doesn't tell him, still, he wakes with her every time anyway.)

Now he sleeps calmly, and she can see his silver-ash hair on the pillow, the way his face has relaxed. She wants to touch his cheek, but that would surely wake him, so she doesn't. Instead, she dresses herself and goes out, saddles her chocobo and rides.

Dawn has the same cool steel color as a blade, and the new morning wind, still chilled with the remnants of night, cuts through her fogged mind and makes her bright and clean again, for a while. She knows that Locke doesn't understand this need of hers, for solitude and for _cold_, and she wishes she had the words to explain it to him.

* * *

When Locke wakes alone, there is always at first a moment of panic when his hands fall to the empty place in the bed beside him. And to his shame, sometimes, with sleep still heavy on his mind, he isn't sure who it is he seeks for when he touches the still-warm hollow in the mattress. It has been years since Rachel ever slept curled in his arms, and yet —

But as he wakes, he thinks, _Celes_, unlike Rachel in almost every way, and then reassures himself: Celes, Celes loves the morning, Celes rides or runs in the face of the dawn with her hair flying and her eyes bright and distant, Celes is whole and hale and there is little that can hurt her in the world. And his heartbeat slows as the panic recedes.

Still, though, he rolls over into the warm spot she left in the bed, and breathes the cool, spicy smell her hair left in the pillow, and lets that lull him back to sleep.

* * *

When she returns and has put up her chocobo properly in the stable with gysahl greens and fresh water, she looks back over where they have come and sees the chocobo's footprints in the frost. It is nearly winter, nearer than she had realized. It pleases her.

Locke is still asleep when she comes in, and she admires him in the dawnlight as she would be embarrassed to do when he is awake. He is slim and lean, olive-skinned though not tan, and with his bandanna removed for sleep his hair falls in his eyes. His blanket has slipped down, so that she can see the muscles of his chest, the way his breastbone rises and falls with his deep sleeping breaths, the way his nipples have tightened in the cold, the way his earrings (he has so many, which both puzzles and pleases her) glitter as he turns his head in sleep. The sight makes her feel protective, and the feeling is a sweet pain in her chest. A sweet, unfamiliar pain. Is this how he feels when he watches her with worried eyes?

She goes to sit beside him on the bed (and realizes only then that he has turned over onto her side of the bed). She brushes his hair out of his eyes and then draws the blankets back up over him. The movement wakes him, as she half-expected, and he looks at her with sleepy, puzzled eyes and then—smiles, and the feeling in her chest intensifies, sharp as a needle.

"I'm going to Narshe soon," she says.

"Mmmf?" he asks, still half-asleep.

"Come with me," she says, and it surprises her as much as him. She has never turned him away when he wants to go with her—but she has never asked him to go, either.

"Okay," he says.

* * *

Locke does not go with her in the winter, because he will never forget her blue lips and blue fingernails, will never forget his terror at seeing her slip into water below freezing. But she has never asked him to come with her before, and there is no way he can refuse. So he goes.

And sure enough, the second day at her house in Narshe, she goes out without a word, without any of her hunting gear. He thinks of staying in the house, beside the fire, but sitting there fretting would be worse, so he goes with her. Watches her strip herself in the thin, cold winterlight of the mountains. She is as beautiful as the mountains, and for much the same reason: they are both bright, stark, unrelenting. There is something in her graceful, muscled body, in her white skin and gold hair and blue eyes, that is very like the sweep of rocks clothed in glittering snow, the dark liquid shimmer of the pool.

She slips into the water, submerges herself, swims, and he holds his breath as he watches.

After a time that cannot be as long as it feels to him, she emerges. And as before he can see the tinge of blue at her fingers and toes and lips, but this time, he doesn't tell her what she should or should not do. He looks at her, bare and cold and shaking.

"The cold was my refuge," she says, unbidden.

She never talks about her past. He unglues his tongue from the roof of his mouth and says, "How so?"

She makes a frustrated noise, waves her hand. "I wanted to be—sharp. And numb. She gave me that."

'She,' her esper, the one that was injected straight into her veins. "It frightens me to see you—tempting death. Like that. The magic is going away. Even you could—"

"It frightens me," she interrupts, "when I don't know who you see when you look at me."

He stares at her. She has not put her clothes on yet, or moved, since she got out of the water. Surely even she is not completely immune to the cold—? "I see the strongest woman I've ever known," he says, "and I see someone who's going to lose her fingers if she's not careful."

Celes, finally, smiles. "Then warm me up," she says, simply.

* * *

Her house in Narshe isn't even really a house—it's one room, mostly taken up with a great hearth on one side and a built-in bunk on the other, with a loft above for storage. So when they sit before the fire their backs are against the bed. Locke builds up the fire and rubs her hands, her feet, to bring the warmth back into them. His hands are very gentle and very clever. She thinks of the way they wield a lockpick, with great care and attention.

"You never ask me to come with you," he says, not looking at her, as his fingers work the sole of her foot.

"I did this time," she replies.

He says nothing, takes her hands, kisses the palms. "I love you," he offers.

"I love you too," she says, though it is hard to say it. She holds onto everything she can, because so much in her life was not her own—and Locke can be so open that she doesn't know if even he knows to whom he is giving himself. But here, now, before the fire he is really looking at her, and though this moment is fragile it is still very real.

"Come to bed," she says, which is strange when they are sitting almost in bed already, and he grins at her suddenly in a way that is very _him_.

She is still damp, but not so wet as to ruin the bedding. The bunk was not really made to fit two, but then, they roll so close together on the old mattress that it doesn't matter. She stretches out a moment and lets him kiss her all over: her mouth, her throat, her breasts, her belly, down between her legs until she is finally warm all through again and laughing. She rakes her fingers through his hair as he nips at the insides of her thighs, teases her, and then tugs meaningfully until he slides up over her again.

They move together with a hard urgency. He is as wet as she is, now, though with sweat rather than with spring-water; the firelight loves him, turns his olive skin to gold and his hair to bright silver. His eyes close and of all the many things her senses take in at that moment (the warmth of his body, the hardness of him deep inside her, the way he smells and tastes, the way he _looks_) she finds herself most fascinated by his eyelashes, heavy on his cheekbones. And its then that she finally cries out and writhes as the pleasure of the moment strikes hard down her spine and then back up it. For long heartbeats it leaves her brilliant and mindless and, and happy.

When her vision clears she sees that he has opened his eyes again and is grinning down at her, eager and breathless. He slides his arms tight around her, rolls them both over so she is on top of him, and it is like that that he comes, some minutes later, and she joins him for a second time.

* * *

When he wakes, in the morning, with the fire banked low and the wind singing outside the cabin, there is no confusion. Before he even opens his eyes, his arms tighten around the woman next to him in the bed, and he thinks, _Celes_.


End file.
